I've been friends with this guy for around 6 months now and we hit it off straight away. I'm 19, he's 21 and we've got the type of friendship where we laugh at absolutely nothing so much we cry and I absolutely love it. At the start I had a bit of a crush on him but he didn't show any interest and I'm not interested in dating right now so it's not happening. Plus our friendship is so much fun I wouldn't want to risk losing that.

We have a common social group in that we both do self defence which is where I met him but we've spent time with each other outside that socially. I've had to postpone self defence until next semester (I'm at university) because I'm too busy and not up for it but I still go to some social things they do and see everyone because I have a lot of good friends there. In the past month or so I've not been able to go to anything and apparently a lot of new people have joined the society. I've not met everyone yet but one of the new girls has started dating my friend. I've obviously got no problems with this and I'm happy for him but I don't know how to act around him when I next see him if she's there? I've never been in this situation before so I'm sorry if it's a stupid question but I don't want her to feel threatened by me in any way because I know our friendship is closer in some ways (we're not very emotionally close but a lot of people assume laughing=flirting) than most between girls and guys.

If you started dating a guy and found out that he had a straight, female friend who was the type of friend he could laugh until he cried with, how would you feel? Would you be perfectly comfortable with that? Or would you hope she took a step back whilst you were dating him?

Humour is such a big part of a relationship for me and I know it is for him too (he was dating another girl not so long ago but it didn't go anywhere because she couldn't make him laugh) so I don't want her to feel like I'm overstepping in any way.

Again, I know a lot of people will probably think this is a stupid question but I've met a lot of women who expect a guy to stop being friends with other women once they get into a relationship and although I think that's stupid I'd want to respect that.